The Bully Pulpit Ain’t What It Used to Be
September 4, 2014
Pundits exhort President Obama to use his bully pulpit to move the Congress or some group to do or cease doing something. For example, Doris Kearns Goodwin has recently called on President Obama to use the bully pulpit in explaining his domestic policy. In her exhortation Goodwin did note that compared to Teddy Roosevelt and previous Presidents, Obama’s pulpit lacked the power of inherent in the written word of daily newspapers and the intensity of broadcasts limited to several networks.
While the presence of many different media platforms have diluted the strength of each, alternative messaging from competing sources has also made it more difficult for Obama to sway an audience. Fox for example, became the first broadcast network to refuse to carry both a Presidential news conference and a speech to Congress in 2009, although Fox’s news channel did carry both addresses. By 2013 all the major networks refused to carry a Presidential address on the Affordable Care Act, perhaps the center piece of Obama’s domestic program.
None of the networks carried President Obama’s nor Vice-President Biden’s Labor Day addresses in their entirety, although both contained major parts of the administration’s domestic program. The bully pulpit simply is not able to sway the public today the way it once could.
September 4, 2014
Pundits exhort President Obama to use his bully pulpit to move the Congress or some group to do or cease doing something. For example, Doris Kearns Goodwin has recently called on President Obama to use the bully pulpit in explaining his domestic policy. In her exhortation Goodwin did note that compared to Teddy Roosevelt and previous Presidents, Obama’s pulpit lacked the power of inherent in the written word of daily newspapers and the intensity of broadcasts limited to several networks.
While the presence of many different media platforms have diluted the strength of each, alternative messaging from competing sources has also made it more difficult for Obama to sway an audience. Fox for example, became the first broadcast network to refuse to carry both a Presidential news conference and a speech to Congress in 2009, although Fox’s news channel did carry both addresses. By 2013 all the major networks refused to carry a Presidential address on the Affordable Care Act, perhaps the center piece of Obama’s domestic program.
None of the networks carried President Obama’s nor Vice-President Biden’s Labor Day addresses in their entirety, although both contained major parts of the administration’s domestic program. The bully pulpit simply is not able to sway the public today the way it once could.